WARNING: The following is the prologue to a story that contains graphic descriptions of dubiously consensual sex in a high fantasy setting. This obvious work of fiction is a work of parody and in no way condones any sexual contact without the consent of all parties. Reader discretion is advised.
* * * * * * *
Diarma took a moment to catch her breath and looked around at the grim scene that filled the cavern around her. The color of the bodies were already beginning to change as her sensitive eyes picked up the heat dissipating from the quickly cooling dead. She chanted a prayer to her goddess and tried to ignore the pain in her shoulder while the wicked gash in her flesh began to close, magic knitting the torn flesh back together. With the incantation complete, she cursed under her breath and took stock of her surroundings. Ten drow warriors lay dead about the expansive cavern, variously hacked and bludgeoned to death by the axes and hammers of the three dozen armored dwarves that now joined them in death. The last of the stout warriors spasmed at her feet as the poison of Diarma's snake-headed whip overloaded his central nervous system and his racing heart pumped the last of his blood from the open wound across his throat. She spat contemptuously on the dwarf, furious at her now grim prospects.
Diarma had been sent with a patrol of her house guards to purge this section of tunnels of a tribe of goblins who had taken up residence in an ancient dwarven mine near the outskirts of an expanding drow city. Goblins made fine slaves for the dark elves, and the cleric and her entourage had expected to return with many new slaves and a possible source of mineral wealth in the centuries-abandoned dwarven mine. To her dismay, a large group of well-equipped dwarves had apparently decided to re-occupy the old mine. Her group had attacked the first group of dwarves, catching them unawares, but drawing the attention of another score of dwarves from the surrounding tunnels with the commotion of battle. What followed was a short but desperate and vicious fight of which Diarma was the sole survivor.
Returning empty handed without any new slaves would have been the latest in a series of unfortunate failures, but losing ten of her house's drow soldiery, nearly a tenth of its total strength, would be enough to set her Matron mother over the edge. Diarma's younger sister was weeks away from finishing her fifth and final decade of training to enter the priestesshood, and their youngest sister was more than thirty years into her training. With two promising young priestesses of Lolth following behind Diarma, her mother could afford to replace her most disappointing daughter and, depending on how she went about it, could increase her own favor in the eyes of their wicked goddess in the process.
Coiling the five living snake-headed tendrils of her whip and replacing it on her hip, the dark elf priestess weighed her options and nearly screamed aloud in rage. The expedition was over, a total disaster for her minor noble house. The heavy, ornate iron door at the carved stone entrance of the mine stood partially ajar before her. It was possible, likely, even, that the dwarves had already driven the goblins from the mine before her raiding party arrived. If so, she could explore and map out the mine, and at least return with valuable information to be exploited later when fortune was not out to get her as it now seemed to be.
If the goblins remained in the mines, they had certainly been alerted by the sound of the battle echoing through the caverns. She could probably intimidate them into submission if she had some of her guards to back her up. The priestess inspected the bodies of her fallen entourage and managed to find the five least managed corpses amongst them. Two looked better than the rest, and Diarma reasoned that they could pass for living drow under the scrutiny of dim-witted goblins. She arranged the five corpses in a circle on the cavern floor and drew a sealed scroll from the satchel at her waist. A muttered incantation and a hand gesture wreathed a stalactite overhead in harmless violet flame which cast just enough light to read by. Breaking the seal and opening the scroll as her eyes adjusted from the infared to the visible spectrum, the drow began to chant the incantation of the prepared spell.
Enchanted ink ignited on the parchment as she finished the spell, consuming the scroll in a wash of green flame and acrid smoke. The smoke spread out away from her in five swirling wisps and coiled around the heads of the dead drow warriors before slithering into their nostrils. In perfect unison, the five male bodies gasped, backs arching, lifeless, glassy eyes snapping wide open. As one, they fell flat, then sat up and rose to their feet, turning toward Diarma, blank faces staring and awaiting her mental command.
The priestess smiled. This might work, she thought. She examined her undead thralls, just as heavily armed, and in the dark, the dark material of their hooded cloaks hid their wounds better than she hoped, but she knew they were already too cold to pass as living dark elves to the heat-sensitive eyes of the goblins. She would have to go into the mine using visible light to hide the cold undead of her five escorts. Diarma quickly rekindled two of the torches dropped by the slain dwarves and handed each of them to an undead drow. Examining her guards, she nodded in approval. From an appropriate distance, they would look dangerous enough to cow any goblins remaining in the mines.
The priestess looked down at the rent in her fine maille shirt and frowned. The dwarf's weapon must have been enchanted to so badly damage the enchanted rings of her armor. The damaged maille shimmered in the torchlight, but the dried blood around the edges of the tear highlighted the fresh, ebony skin underneath. She was the only drow standing still capable of speech, and could not avoid the attention of any goblins they may encounter. Remembering the lessons of her youth, Diarma decided it would be better to appear confident and invincible in just her clerical robes than in damaged armor stained in her own blood.
She pulled the ruined shirt of maille up over her head and tossed it to the cavern floor before untying the laces on the sleeveless arming doublet of supple leather underneath. Shrugging off the vest, Diarma belted her weapons and satchel back on over her robes, sheer black fabric threaded through with spiderweb patterns leaving nothing to the imagination above the knees. The open neckline plunged below her navel, just above her naturally bald pubis. Soft black leather boots rose to just below her knees and magically muffled her footfalls. Taking a deep breath in through her nose, she closed her eyes and exhaled through her mouth.
"Lolth test me," she whispered, the traditional prayer of her people, then telepathically bade her five undead companions to draw their swords and form up around her as she strode through the iron door and into the ancient mine.
Diarma walked in the center of the formation with her reanimated warriors formed around her in a pentagram. The two bearing torches walked abreast in front of her, two more moving parallel slightly behind her and further apart from each other than the two in front, and the most obviously dead of the five bringing up the rear directly behind the priestess, furthest from the revealing torchlight. The tunnel through which they moved was carved from the rock and unworked on its walls and ceiling, but the floor had been paved with fitted, flat stone blocks. Diarma reasoned the even surface was meant to facilitate the travel of carts and ore haulers in and out of the mine. Iron rings driven into the walls at her eye level at regular intervals seemed to be waiting to hold torches or lamps for the dwarven miners.
Diarma was of average height for a dark elf at five and a half feet, and she guessed that lamps above the eye level of the dwarven miners would do less to interfere with their comparatively crude dark vision than having light sources at eye level. A few of the rings held old oil lamps that looked as though they hadn't been lit in centuries. She noticed the firelight reflecting off one lamp coming up on their left that seemed newer than the others, and she was wondering why that one seemed relatively new compared to the rest when her two leading zombies passed a couple of feet in front of it.
The cast bronze lamp vanished in a dazzling flash of white light with a chest-thumping boom that left her ears ringing painfully as it echoed throughout the underdark for half a mile in every direction. The priestess' eyes watered and stung and she fell to one knee as two of her senses were stripped away in an instant.
